Grumpy Old Men

A Debate to End All Debates————————-

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                As TV entertainment goes this season, I found the first presidential debate slightly more entertaining than most TV comedies and certainly more so than Donald Trump’s old TV reality series, “Celebrity Apprentice”. But perhaps I’m too easily amused. Aside from whatever entertainment value the debates may provide to audiences confined to home by the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t imagine why we need two more repeats. If the first didn’t change any undecided minds, except perhaps to decide to vote for neither, I doubt that two more would. And now the alarming news of the president’s and first lady’s diagnoses with the COVID-19 disease should rule out further presidential debates in the short time before the election. Mr. Trump will need to conserve his energy to facilitate the speedy recovery that we all should wish and pray for.

                In a boxing match, the fighters are instructed to shake hands and come out fighting. These belligerents skipped the handshake, didn’t even bother to bump elbows and just started fighting. This shootout should have been staged at the OK Corral. At least it would have been a safer outdoor venue. For younger voters watching, if any were, they might have thought it was a remake of the 1993 Warner Brothers movie, “Grumpy Old Men”. (Full disclosure: I’m old and occasionally grumpy.)

                I doubt that moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News found it very entertaining or amusing though. He had expressed the hope that the candidates would interact freely and that he would be largely invisible. He may as well have been for all the success he had in keeping the candidates from interacting all over each other and ignoring his pleas to wait their turn. President Trump started the interrupting but former Vice-president Biden took the bait and quickly joined in with each man talking over the other and exchanging insults and making faces at each other.

                A debate between the president of the world’s most powerful nation and the man who aspires to be should be conducted with dignity and at least some attempt at mutual respect. This was less a debate than a dogfight, with apologies to the canine species. Debate? Neither of these two apparently knows how to debate. Both have trouble staying on topic or completing a thought. I wonder if Mr. Trump has ever completed a sentence in his entire life or if Mr. Biden has ever taken a firm position on anything.

                We already knew what Trump’s debating style was, so spare me the shocked reactions of some of the pundits. We watched him demolish and insult the other, better-qualified candidates during the 2016 GOP primaries. He won the election because he faced a highly-flawed candidate who ran a terrible campaign and yet, in spite of her flaws, probably was on track to win until James Comey’s eleventh-hour meddling. There was hope that he would become more presidential as he grew into the job but that just didn’t happen, perhaps in part because Democrats never accepted his election as legitimate and squandered four years trying to undermine his presidency and remove him from office. But I expected that the usually-mannerly Joe Biden would at least maintain his cool. But it wasn’t cool to call the President of the United States a liar, a racist, a clown (twice), the worst president the country has ever had, tell him to “Shut up, man” and accuse him of being responsible for COVID-19 deaths. He wouldn’t say whether or not a Biden Administration would try to pack the Supreme Court or push for District of Columbia and Puerto Rico statehood. He said he did not favor defunding the police but that when responding to 911 calls they should show up with a psychologist or psychiatrist to talk people down and keep from having to use force. (Question: How many behavioral scientists does it take to defuse a 911 situation? Answer: One, as long as at least two armed police officers are there to protect the behavioral scientist and the potential victims.)

                Trump, in turn, or rather without bothering to wait for his turn, questioned Biden’s intelligence, referring to a recent claim by Mr. Biden that he “started out” at Delaware State University, an historically-black college that, in fact, he never attended. Trump said that Biden wasn’t smart, did poorly in school and that he (Trump) did more in 47 months as president than Biden did in 47 years as a senator and vice-president.

                The most serious part of this 97-minute food fight concerned the economy, the president’s trump card as it were, and a major area of disagreement between the two parties. Republicans generally favor an early re-opening of the economy citing the economic harm and emotional damage caused by prolonged shutdowns while Democrats generally favor a more cautious approach. Biden said that the economy can’t be revived until the pandemic is defeated. This is a major issue that voters must consider along with the issue of continuing violence in the cities. Trump said that he could quickly stop the violence in the cities, blaming it on poor leadership by Democrat mayors and local officials. He boasted of his widespread support by law enforcement organizations and challenged Biden to name even one that supported him. Biden was willing to condemn violence but wouldn’t concede that it was caused mostly by leftist agitators as Trump alleged.

                Our Chinese and Russian adversaries must have watched this spectacle with great amusement. We really don’t need two rematches for voters to realize they again have a choice between two awful candidates and that the more important choice will be between the policies that each party plans to implement if successful. Maybe by 2024 they can find someone to run who actually knows how to be president or at least act like one on TV.

Dr. Kelly is a freelance writer and retired Navy Captain who commanded three ships and the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center and taught ship handling, seamanship and navigation at Naval Base San Diego. He earned his doctorate in education from USD, taught graduate students and was a senior vice-president and Director of Training and Development at Great American Bank. He has written over 1500 newspaper and journal articles and has been a regular contributor the Eagle&Journal since 2001.

October 10, 2020

Full Court Press

A Full-Court Press—————————–

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                The rush to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg so close to a presidential election is unseemly, say the Democrats. But the winner of the coming election, if it as close as most believe it will be, may not be known until days after election day, owing to the large volume of mailed ballots and the differences among the states regarding the rules for when they must be received, processed, counted and otherwise handled. Three battleground states have recently revised their rules, Michigan being the latest as of this writing, where a state judge ruled that ballots that arrive up to 14 days late must be counted as long as they are postmarked by Nov.2. There is litigation pending in other states as well. Surveys show that far more Democrats than Republicans will vote by mail, so most of the late ballots will favor the Harris/Biden, sorry, Biden/Harris ticket. Therefore, Hillary Clinton advised Joe Biden not to concede, no matter what.

                A contested outcome seems likely unless the winner enjoys a landslide victory which few expect to happen. This is the principal reason why it is important to have a full court seated. A less noble but still valid reason is because that’s the way the game of politics is played today. Does anyone doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot, the left one, that is, a Democrat president would promptly nominate a liberal judge and a Democrat Senate would promptly confirm that nominee, no matter how close to election day. Republicans would be foolish to pass on this opportunity and President Trump’s base would never forgive him.

                The 2000 presidential election was finally decided when the Supreme Court ordered Florida to cease recounting and dithering over the meaning of hanging chads and stray marks on ballots. Al Gore, who won the popular vote, then conceded and the transition was amicable enough. But that was then. Nothing about politics is very amicable now and if the court is required to intervene, all nine justices should be seated to avoid a possible deadlock or claims that a ruling might have been different if the ninth justice had been seated.

                Democrats have their hair on fire over Mr. Trump’s decision to exercise his constitutional right and duty to expeditiously act to fill the vacancy. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer darkly warned that “nothing is off the table”, as if it ever was.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ominously spoke of having “more arrows in her quiver”. It’s enough to make one, well, quiver! And a Biden victory would almost certainly lead to a push for statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico anyway which would result in four more reliably Democrat senators.

                Democrats are bemoaning the politicization of the court. But it was the Democrats who started that politicization with the “borking” of Judge Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s nominee to the court. Mr. Biden, hopefully, can still remember the attacks on the eminently-qualified Judge Bork since he presided over those hearings as Chairman of the Senate Judicial Committee in 1987. That started a habit of Democrats “borking” Republican nominees to the court including Abe Fortas, Harrold Carlswell, Manuel Estrada, Clarence Thomas, who described the eleventh-hour smear on his character as a “high-tech lynching” and, most recently, Brett Kavanaugh, who was subjected to uncorroborated charges of sexual misbehavior dating back to high school. California’s own Sen. Dianne Feinstein and then-Sen. Kamala Harris helped lead that attempt at character assassination. There’s little doubt that Mr. Trump’s nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the mother of seven children, two of them adopted from Haiti and one with Down Syndrome, will be subjected to vicious attacks, not because of her record and qualifications which are impeccable, but because she is an orginalist who interprets the law the way it was written, not the way that activists wish it had been written, and because she was nominated by the hated Donald Trump.

                Democrats began filibustering dozens of Republican appellate court nominees as well until a group of senators from both parties reached a deal to vote to confirm all qualified nominees except for “extraordinary circumstances”. But in 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended that agreement. He was warned that breaking the 60-vote filibuster rule was a double-edged sword that could come back to haunt the Democrats and it did when they tried to filibuster Neil Gorsuch.  It only takes 51 votes in the Senate now to confirm and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell apparently has the votes.

                It’s true that Mr. Mc Connell denied a senate confirmation hearing to Judge Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016. But Judge Garland likely would not have been confirmed by the GOP-controlled senate. And, unlike the Democrats, Republicans have never “borked” a nominee to the court. Some Democrats and a few Republicans feel that the late Justice Ginsberg’s wish that her seat, which she filled with great distinction for 27 years, remain vacant until the winner of this election is inaugurated, should be respected. With all due respect to her memory, that isn’t her call. Voters don’t get to select Supreme Court Justices under our Constitution. Presidents do, subject to Senate confirmation, and Mr. Trump is still president.

Kelly is a freelance writer and retired Navy Captain who commanded three San Diego-based ships and the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center and taught ship handling, seamanship and navigation at Naval Base San Diego. He earned his doctorate in education at USD, taught graduate students and was a senior vice-president and Director of Training and Development at Great American Bank. He has written over 1500 newspaper and journal articles and has been a regular contributor to the Eagle&Journal since 2001.

October 5, 2020